Holiday Greetings... Cardinal Collage and Poinsettia Images!

This will most likely be my last post for 2011 since I'm expecting family tomorrow and will be visiting over the next few days with them. On Christmas Eve, I will be cooking dinner for them, myself, friends and cousins who live locally. For your viewing pleasure during the holiday season, here are a couple of Poinsettia images and a collage of cardinals... my favorites in winter! Wishing everyone a joyous holiday season and a healthy, happy new year.(wrote this on Dec 22nd, had difficulty posting but here it is finally... I'm sharing this on Macro Monday (Jan 2, 2012) over at Lisa's Chaos... come on over and join the fun!)

Close-up of a miniature Poinsettia taken with iPhone camera, sharpened and cropped with PerfectPhoto, run through AutoPainter with Aquarell effect. Photo and paint layers blended in Iris with 35% opacity for the paint layer.

Image taken with Nikon D7000 and Nikon 105mm macro lens at ISO 250, f/3.5, 1/60 sec. Sharpened using Topaz In Focus plug-in in Photoshop... AMAZING! Text added in Photoshop.

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal on snowy winter days. (Some of you have seen these before but I just love Cardinals in winter so here they are again, freshly put together as a collage in Picnik.)

Sunrise... Sunset... Four images of sunlight on the water in Cape May, NJ

I keep letting life get in the way of posting on my blog... so sorry! With the holidays fast approaching and another trip in the offing (a short one over the New Year to ring in 2012 with friends in Montana), I'll make no promises that I cannot keep!

Meanwhile, while at the Cape May, NJ photography workshop recently (with John Barclay and George Brown), I spent quite a lot of time shooting sunlight on the water during both sunrises and sunsets. These four images were captured using a Singh Ray Vari-ND filter with my Nikon D7000 (new toy) fitted with a Nikon 18-200mm lens. The diagonally opposite landscape orientation images are from sunrise on the first morning of the workshop; the other two are from sunset the same day.